Soyuz 5

NSSDCA/COSPAR ID: 1969-005A

Description

Soyuz 5 was launched with a crew of three men -- Boris Volynov, Commander, Aleksey Yeliseyev, Flight Engineer, and Yevgeniy Khrunov, Research Engineer. It co-orbited with Soyuz 4, they both made orbital corrections, and then during the 34th orbit of Soyuz 4 and the 18th orbit of Soyuz 5, the automatic docking system brought the ships to within 99 m of one another. Cosmonaut Shatalov of Soyuz 4 completed the docking maneuver manually, and the two ships flew for 4 hr 35 min with completely interlocking controls, power, and telephones. During the 35th orbit of Soyuz 5, cosmonauts Khrunov and Yeliseyev passed into the orbital compartment of their ship, donned pressure suits, opened the outer hatch, and floated and used handrails to maneuver themselves to the opened hatch of Soyuz 4. Television cameras recorded the entire procudure both inside and outside the ships. The combined ships were hailed in Soviet announcements as the world's first space station. Pictures of the docked crafts revealed the spherically shaped work cabin at the far end, the bell-shaped command module (convex ablative surface facing aft, rounded truncated cone ahead) joined to the work compartment by an air lock, and the service module with its two winglike solar cell panels at the rear. Manual orientation, orbit corrections, scientific and technological experiements, biomedical investigations, geological and gegraphical observations, observations of celestial luminaries, TV reporting, still and moving photography, and navigational measurements were accomplished during the joined flight. Soyuz 5 with Volynov on board landed 200 km southeast of Kustanai.